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Five Questions

By habit or design, a lot of my thinking is made manifest in the form of questions. Some of that comes from who my mentors are. Much of it comes from the sparks I pick up from educators and teachers in my life who let me to work, think, babble and collaborate with them. I write questions on Post-Its, in notebooks, bury them in rambling blog posts, or save them as possible titles for half-drafted essays. Will Richardson’s recent post gave me an excuse to coral some up, dust them off, and set them lose.

The five questions that are rattling around at the top of my brain pan at this moment:

1. Do the cons of reducing learning to a number or symbol outweigh the pros?

2. What are the implications in education when those doing the telling are mostly white men and those being told are mostly white women?

3. What is the responsibility of those former good girls and good students in this system of our own making?

4. How do we navigate the implications of a profession that is 85% white without inadvertently overburdening or erasing teachers of color?

5. If we’ve made the collective decision that free, compulsory education is good for society, how do we ensure that as many days as possible are filled with experiences students give a shit about?

Some of them I’m working on answering. A few I know the answer to. I think. Maybe. As of right now. It may change in five minutes. Possibly.